


Six Months

by JUBE514



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! - All Media Types, Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS
Genre: Child Abuse, Gen, Loneliness, Obsessive Behavior, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm, Solitary Confinement, Starvation, Why did they do this to children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-28 23:07:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20072113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JUBE514/pseuds/JUBE514
Summary: The first week was one of the worsts by far.Duel or die. Random opponents, random decks, random shocks.Useless to cry out, screaming in pain and begging for salvation. Nobody could hear him, nobody was listening.Two meals a day, if you won at least seven duels in a row by whenever the time ticked around for the meal to be delivered. If you didn’t, or the duels were broken up by losses, the food got reduced as punishment or didn’t come at all.





	Six Months

The first week was one of the worsts by far. 

Duel or die. Random opponents, random decks, random shocks. 

Useless to cry out, screaming in pain and begging for salvation. Nobody could  _ hear _ him, nobody was  _ listening.  _

Two meals a day, if you won at least seven duels in a row by whenever the time ticked around for the meal to be delivered. If you didn’t, or the duels were broken up by losses, the food got reduced as punishment or didn’t come at all. 

Once a day the back wall opened to the smallest bathroom anyone could imagine, with just a toilet, no sink or shower. 

Yusaku screamed every time he lost life points, feeling the electricity dance up his nerves, but he wept when he lost because that means the shook was stronger, lasted longer, and could completely knock you back. 

Yusaku learned quickly to slam himself down as the last of his life points ticked away, because he was less likely to hurt himself if he seized on the floor then upright and standing. 

The smell was ignored because Yusaku could do nothing against it. The steady creep of unwashed greasy hair sticking to the back of his neck, the way his clothes began to become grimy and sweat through, how sometimes his pale skin -getting paler by the day- broke out into thick searches of bright red rashes and hives. 

It was a month into it when Yusaku’s voice just gave out, his screams didn’t echo around the chamber every time he lost life points because he was  _ too tired.  _ Sometimes if he lost by a large enough margin the resulting shock was enough to tear out a brutal, guttural sound from the back of his torn-to-shreds vocal chords. 

He can’t even talk to himself anymore, no sound comes out when Yusaku tries to whisper comforts to himself in the time of day when the anonymous duels grow sparse. 

The duels are always with random settings, people, and decks. Yusaku recognizes the VR system from the arcade that’s two blocks down from his school, it’s connected to a larger online system with players all around the world. The people that play him are  _ real _ on the other side of the screen, but they still lay their cards down without heading the silent begging of a child. 

Yusaku himself prefers beatdown decks, monsters that can be summoned easily to his field to protect him from the hard shocks of his life points draining away. The decks that have monsters that can swarm the field quickly and without mercy are the quickest way to assure he gets  _ fed _ . 

The food hasn’t changed, but Yusaku does notice that his clothes are ill fitting now, his comfortable boots now sag into his tiny calves and his shirt collar has been stretched and torn. The jeans he’s wearing lucky came with a very dandy looking belt, so he moves the buckle tighter by one size and continues to duel. 

Yusaku thanks his lucky stars that his jacket is still warm during the very cold nights of month two. Not that Yusaku  _ knew _ it was month two at the time, just knew that the nighttime sky that was visible from his small window kept getting longer as the days dragged by in a hazel daze. 

The room wasn’t  _ cold _ , per-say, but it was nowhere close to comfortable either. The room was never anywhere near  _ warm _ , don’t let the test subjects not freezing fool you, Yusaku has to unkink his fingers after every morning pulls him from his fitful sleep. 

He starts to scratch at the walls during this time, little fingers tearing themselves up on hard concrete as his eyes read through kanji that’s just on the edge of being too advanced for him to really understand. He has to learn to read everything as quickly as possible, the people who duel Yusaku aren’t always the most patient kind and if they back out of a duel that’s a loss for both players. 

Yusaku’s fingers get torn up when his little hands try to find any give in the walls that surround him, try to pick at seams that aren’t there. His fingers are numb with cold and the repeated shocks, the only thing that makes Yusaku notice his idle habit is when little bloody fingerprints smear themselves onto the water box that comes down three times a day. 

His hands are disgusting, and Yusaku is  _ sure _ that his left pinky doesn’t have a nail anymore but for the life of him he  _ doesn’t care _ anymore. He just puts the tiny box of water back onto the drone and straps back on the VR headset. 

The injuries scratched on his hands just continues to sluggishly bleed, smearing his tray and his water, getting into his hair when he pushes grimy greasy bangs out of his way.

Yusaku doesn’t stop scratching at the walls. 

Month three comes and goes, the passage of time is blurred to almost nothing. If the cell didn’t have a small window then Yusaku would have stopped being able to sleep in any kind of pattern at all. 

The small jacket that once was shiny and new is now dull and covers more of him than it did when Yusaku first had it given to him. The duel headset makes his eyes blurry if he uses it too long, what was once a comfortable fit on his head now feels loose. 

He’s starting being able to scream again when he loses so that’s a sign of something. 

His nails on his fingers are all gone, long since being lost to his wandering hands during the enemy’s standby phase. His blood trails the walls is macabre circles, looping over and over at the same height, dragged behind a pacing child. 

The food quality somehow gets  _ worse _ . Or maybe that’s just Yusaku’s tastebuds dying. 

He can’t tell anymore. 

Yusaku’s socks have holes in them, his shirts barely holding on and his jeans are covered with things Yusaku is not going to name. Everything feels so  _ stiff _ on him, but he can’t take it off because the room just gets colder as the days pass. 

He’s gotten better at dueling now. He wins every four out of five of his matches. He’s seen most of the tricks, knows most of the cards, responds to traps and spells with combos of his own. His math was always good, but he has certain combinations of moves memorized with the amount of damage they give and take. 

Month four is when Yusaku’s able to whisper to himself in low tones again, and hearing his own voice is such a sick  _ shock _ he nearly cries. It  _ hurts _ to talk, but it’s worth it for there to be sound in this hellhole of a room. The tips of his fingers are entirely numb, but he can pick up cards just fine, hold them in his knuckles and shuffle his cards. 

He still picks at the walls, but they’ve long since stopped bleeding anymore. 

Screams get torn from his throat when he takes hard hits or the opponent wipes the floor with him, and that  _ hurts _ something deep inside his throat. 

He sleeps for very long periods of time now, used to the hard floors and uncomfortable temperature. Sometimes he’ll nod off in the early morning and when he wakes it’s almost the dawn of the next day. 

Sometimes Yusaku shakes himself awake from a standing position, jerks awake from sitting perfectly upright. 

The only thing that keeps him awake is duels and food. 

That's the only thing in here to  _ look _ at. To interact with. To do  _ anything with _ . 

Month five starts a spiral that Yusaku can’t seem to pull himself from, he does terrible in duels, the food stops coming. Everytime he gets shocked he doesn’t stand back up again immediately. 

Five months, 150  _ days _ , sitting alone in the dark with only a small window to brighten the room. 

Shaking fingers, blurry vision, thick red rashes across his stomach and back that burn with every movement of his torso. 

The voice tells him to keep going. 

Three things,  _ just three things. _

Yusaku screams his voice out again trying to get the person to talk with him again. Please, anything,  _ something _ to distract him from this hell. 

Three things to look forward too when he gets out: not dueling, food that fills him, a  _ shower _ . 

Three things to focus on now: his next meal, his next move, his next duel. 

Three things. 

_ Three things _ . 

Three things get him to month sixth. 

Yusaku finally had to get rid of his shirt and socks, the socks nothing but threads and the shirt crusted over in sweat and dried blood. The jacket’s soft on his torso, but it still makes Yusaku hiss when the jacket pulls the skin the wrong way. 

The jeans sadly can’t be replaced or covered, but they’ve been surprisingly resilient to the wear and tear of the months of being worn. 

Three things to focus on in duels, his hand, his life points, the enemies field. 

  1. He’s winning nearly every duel now, so his food becomes the steadiest it's ever been. 
  2. His shaking fingers stop shaking, he has three fingernails now, two thumbnails and one pinky. 
  3. Three teeth have fallen out. Yusaku keep them in his pocket of his jacket. 

Yusaku whispers to himself after he wins, three things. Three monsters facedown, three card limit to the decks, three teeth in his jacket, three fingernails on his hand, three loops around the room after a duel. 

There are three things to keep him going. 

When the door opens, dusk light spilling into the small room, Yusaku can’t bring himself to scream in surprise. The whole thing seems like a dream, the thing that Yusaku had imagined so many times it felt more like a fantasy. 

It's only when a man rushes forward and picks Yusaku bodily off the ground that Yusaku finally realizes that this is  _ real. _

After months of sitting alone the touch is a  _ shock _ . It makes Yusaku break out into trembles, huge wracking sobs that the rescuers try in vain to soothe with soft careful motions. The man's fingers just get stuck and tangled in Yusaku’s matted hair, so the man tries rubbing his back but  _ that _ just makes Yusaku cry harder as the rash across his ribs becomes irritated. 

It takes a while, but the man  _ does _ pull Yusaku from the room that has been his prison for sixth months. 

The air outside is so  _ clean _ compared to the still air in the concrete dungeon, it smells like winter and it's cold and crisp and without the oppressive  _ smell _ that was always lingering in the room. The cries of other children make Yusaku aware of the other five around him, being pulled out into the cold air. 

There's so much  _ happening _ , so fast, that Yusaku can’t remember everything that's happening all at once. 

Lights are flashing, the blue and red of emergency vehicles blind Yusaku when he looks at them. People are yelling orders, handing shock blankets out from ambulances and wrapping the children up. 

In the ambulance the nice people cut off his jeans and peel away his jacket, one of the two tries to use alcohol wipes to clean Yusaku’s skin and the other one is checking over his hands. 

He’s being asked what he remembers, what happened to him, who did this to him. 

The hospital he goes too tells him and the caretakers that he's suffering from Contact Dermatitis, that he’ll need to keep himself clean and soothe his irritated infected blistering skin with various creams. They doctors look at this throat and wince at the callouses on his vocal chords that make speech painful for him. 

The psychiatrists whisper in the hallway where they think Yusaku can’t hear them about the poor traumatized children. Post traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, irrational impulses, self harm, difficulty interacting with people, obsessive compulsive. 

It’s an agglomeration of bad piled onto a small child who’s still on dietary restrictions to get him back to at  _ least  _ 15 kgs. 

It’s going to be a long road back to healthy, he’ll never be completely back to baseline. He’ll always have nightmares, he’ll always have a hard time pushing through duel monsters, he’ll always have an obsessive personality. 

He’ll always always be searching for  _ something, _ but he survived to live another day. 

Yusaku get released from the hospital four months after he was found, and quietly makes his way back into society with the other five nameless victims. 

**Author's Note:**

> dont u judge me i love yugioh


End file.
